Animals starve when fed on salt-free food
Dis-ease may also be defined as partial death, for it is the disturbance or weakening of functions whose complete failure we call death. Starvation illustrates one side of this process. When nutritive material ceases to be supplied, the cells have nothing with which to work, causing disturbance of function (dis-ease), and then partial, or complete death. The man in a desert under a hot sun will starve for water in one-tenth the time that he would starve for solid food. Animals fed on a diet from which all salts have been chemically removed will die in a shorter time than will those from which all food is withheld. This rather interesting fact is due to the rapid utilization of the salts residual in the body during the digestion and the assimilation of the salt-free foods taken. The order in which the withdrawal of nutritive substances will produce starvation is about as follows:
1 Aerial oxygen
2 Water
3 Mineral salts
4 Organic nitrogen
5 Carbohydrates
Examples of drug poisoning
Poisoning by drugs is an excellent illustration of dis-ease and death produced by specific starvation. When a man takes ether, this substance, passing to the brain, immediately interferes with the function of that organ. Insensibility to pain results. If ether is taken in larger quantities, the functions of the brain may be still further interfered with, and the nervous control of the heart beat will be lost, and death will ensue. When castor-oil is taken into the alimentary canal, the irritating substances therein contained inflame the cells of the mucous membrane, and excite them to abnormal secretion, thus disturbing the harmony of the body-activities, and producing dis-ease.
Scientific definition of dis-ease
The examples here referred to are not commonly considered dis-ease, because we know the particular or immediate cause of the physical disturbance. Modern knowledge now shows us that the most prolific cause of what is commonly known as dis-ease is but the interference with cell activities, either by the deficiency or by the excess of nutritive substances, or by the presence of irritating and disturbing poisons. This condition may be caused by an unbalanced diet containing too much of certain nutritive elements, or too little of others, causing surfeiting on the one hand and starvation on the other.
Man still in the childhood state of development
Hunger, thirst, and taste are Nature's language